Mastodon is less discoverable than Twitter, particularly because it doesn’t have full-text search, and because it has multiple instances. How do we know what’s going on, or which instances are particularly active?

There is a webpage of instance data somewhere. That is a good starting point.

But what about propagation of individual posts? How do they get seen, how quickly do other instances pick them up, which other instances? Here I summarise a quick experiment that exploits a feaure of mastodon software’s behaviour to map out some details of how a post is seen by other instances. Continue reading Pinging Mastodon instances →